The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “That’s what ladies always say when guys think they’re dogs,” Trudy muttered.

  “He was interested in power,” Alexis went on. “And he liked to play games. Often when a flirtation is consummated, the game is over. I think he liked to put off that closure as long as possible. Physical gratification was very low on his list. I think he found it embarrassing. Sexual congress is, after all, difficult to pull off with élan. And one shudders to contemplate Barrington in the buff. His soul is clad. He probably emerged from the birth canal in tails.”

  “Hell, I think the guy was a fag,” Pyre intruded.

  “Now, that’s a stretch,” said Alexis.

  “Look at the women he went after with a vengeance,” said Pyre. “Nicola; my wife. It was their husbands he wanted to poke up the ass.”

  “But as FAR AS YOU ALL KNOW,” Edgar raised his voice to overcome Trudy and Martha, who were arguing over Trudy’s claim that Barrington suffered from an unfillable hollow in his heart, “Saddler had no big-deal relationship going elsewhere, aside from Benazir?”

  They ignored him.

  “You don’t honestly think he was happy?” Trudy shouted.

  “Who wouldn’t be happy?” Martha shouted back. “With success, totally unearned adulation, and women galore—”

  “Your version of happiness is sad, Martha!”

  “You sound jealous,” Alexis chided Pyre. “Did you want him to ‘poke’ you, too?”

  “Nymphos, the theory goes, can’t get satisfaction,” said Pyre. “It’s not that they’re oversexed; they’re frigid. Why should men be any different? Saddler’s appetite for poontang was suspicious. I think he kept going back for more because he didn’t like it the first time.”

  “Oh, that makes sense!” said Alexis.

  “What he liked is sticking it to other men—”

  “The only reason he chose Nicky is he couldn’t have her!” Trudy screamed over Pyre. “And that’s typical when you don’t feel worthy—”

  “Oh, puh-lease, he ran after Nicola so he could RUIN HER LIFE!” screamed Martha.

  Discreetly, Edgar worked his chair from the circle, reached into his jacket, and switched off the tape. He had enough material. As he eased out of the Barking Rat, Edgar felt unnecessary. This crowd hardly required the prodding of an interviewer and a microcassette. In his very extraneousness Edgar felt a curious alliance with Saddler. Even vanished, Barrington was a franchise, in which other people enjoyed a controlling interest. Absent or dead, he’d left his investors with a toy version of himself—a bauble with which his acquaintances might endlessly fiddle, a puzzle to obsessively take apart and reconstruct. Like Falconer, Saddler was less man than notion, a glittering mirror ball in which his companions could see flashes of themselves or, more bitterly, glimpses of what they were not.

  Chapter 14

  No Trace Found of Reporter in Terrorist Stronghold

  EDGAR KELLOGG, BARBA CORRESPONDENT

  CINZIERO—Neither his acquaintances nor Portuguese authorities have successfully shed light on the whereabouts of Barrington Saddler, who went missing in April this year. Until his disappearance, Mr. Saddler was the Barba correspondent for the National Record.

  Cinziero is home to the headquarters of O Creme de Barbear, the political arm of Os Soldados Ousados de Barba (SOB). Pronounced “Osh Sol-DA-dosh Oo-ZHA-dos” and literally “The Daring Soldiers of Barba,” the SOB has built a reputation for ruthlessness by sponsoring a series of devastating terrorist incidents abroad over the last five years. Some fear Mr. Saddler’s unexplained absence might involve paramilitary foul play.

  Were Mr. Saddler to have met misfortune at the hands of the SOB—determined to win Barba independence from Portugal—the move would mark an alarming shift in SOB strategy. Hitherto, the southern Portuguese militants have steered clear of journalists. Remaining correspondents in the province have grown uneasy.

  O Creme de Barbear (Portuguese for “shaving cream,” as the party hopes to shear Barba, the “beard” of the peninsula, from the mainland) is protective of its public image, and courts a friendly relationship with foreign reporters through regular press conferences. The party’s president, Tomás Verdade (pronounced “Ver-DADZH”), could not be reached for comment. Other sources high up in O Creme deny any knowledge of the journalist’s whereabouts.

  Of all the correspondents posted to Cinziero, Mr. Saddler would make a curious target. The missing reporter’s coverage was unusually sensitive to the SOB’s outrage over high rates of illegal Muslim immigration. A deluge of both economic and political refugees from North Africa has been transforming the demographic make-up of the region.

  Now forty-one, Mr. Saddler is originally from Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, but has worked for American newspapers most of his career. After leaving the Los Angeles Times under cloudy circumstances, Mr. Saddler joined the staff of the National Record at the paper’s inception. Previous postings include Bangkok, Port-au-Prince, Nairobi, and Moscow.

  Flamboyant and controversial—some would say notorious—Mr. Saddler was a devotee of “new journalism,” or what one anonymous source deemed “screaming fabrication.” Certainly he bent the rules of his craft, as he likewise bent the rules of social life. A known womanizer who played fast and loose with both money and the truth, Mr. Saddler was renowned for his storytelling in every sense.

  Theories about his truancy range from paramilitary assassination to an illicit femme fatale tryst, but common irresponsibility never features in popular versions of Mr. Saddler’s fate. Few onlookers wish to believe that the vanishing of a local luminary could be explained by the lame misadventures that seem to befall mere mortals who fail to show up for work.

  Yet do mythic characters always meet mythic ends? No SOB statement has taken credit for the reporter’s disappearance. In times past, the organization has displayed a veritable eagerness to claim even the most heinous crimes.

  The celebrated Barrington Saddler could well have slipped on a banana peel—or, in Barba, more likely an overripe pera peluda, or hairy pear—and tumbled haplessly into a ditch. But despite ostensible dedication to the straight scoop, his journalistic colleagues reject pedestrian hypotheses out of hand.

  “News is entertainment,” Mr. Saddler is reputed to have declared. He might be gratified to learn that as news he, too, is entertainment. Alive or dead, the reporter continues to thrive in the obsessive conjecture of his contemporaries. Another of Mr. Saddler’s aphorisms apparently ran, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” They haven’t.

  * * *

  “I loved your article,” said Nicola on opening the door, confounding at the outset Edgar’s vow to cleanse his conversation of you-know-who for her husband’s sake.

  Henry shouted from the living room, “Been nervous of ditches ever since!”

  “First draft was snappier,” Edgar allowed, delivering a bottle and a flat wrapped package. “But Wallasek wouldn’t publish that his own reporter was a total fraud.”

  “Don’t tell me.” Nicola glanced at his gifts. “You had a dreadful time deciding what to bring. Lafite Rothschild? Fortunately for you, Cinziero off-licenses don’t carry bottles worth more than a fiver. This is lovely port. Thank you.” She kissed his cheek. “I’d tell you not to bother next time, except that no one ever brings us anything anymore. Honestly, I’d be delighted if you kept it up.”

  She tore at the ribbon with childlike impatience. “Now you can appreciate how hard it is for me to be generous with Henry. The irony of wealth is that it becomes impossible to treat yourself. Oh, brilliant!”

  “I’m afraid it’s labeled, ‘For ages four to seven,’ ” said Edgar of the little tin watercolor set. Maybe one viable alternative to exorbitance with the affluent was a gift exquisitely cheap.

  “That’s a little old for me, but I have my precocious moments. And what super colors! Come on in. Henry has promised to be more personable.”

  This time, down the stone steps and into the parlor Edgar did feel
welcome. Almost too. Nicola was burbling with gratitude, and Henry’s face relaxed in relief. Any guest apparently improved on just the two of them alone in the room.

  “Edgar!” Henry roused himself from a sprawl to shake Edgar’s hand. “Sorry I was shirty the other night, right? That lot can get up my nose.”

  The lanky clasp felt sincere, and a heaviness descended on Edgar for the duration. Damn it to hell. Henry Durham showed every sign of being a stand-up guy.

  “Your article was, what do you Yanks say? A three-pointer.”

  “I wouldn’t call it better than a solid bank shot,” Edgar dismissed, though he’d pulled an all-nighter debating celebrated versus fawned over, flamboyant versus garish.

  “A blinder.” Henry plopped back to the sofa. The pillow he tucked behind his head was crocheted with the growling logo of the Barking Rat. “Still, you mustn’t expect sweet nothings from the rest of that bunch. They don’t like new boys. They don’t like crack competition. They don’t like the whole notion of Barrington being replaced. And they don’t like being written up—accurate-like, right?—as gossipy old bints. I doubt Barrington slipped on a hairy pear, but I fancied the picture.”

  “Speaking of hairy pears, you should consider retooling that pera peluda piece for an American magazine,” said Edgar, attempting a professional camaraderie thus far singularly lacking in Cinziero’s press corps. “It’s perfect for a ‘Postcard from Barba’ in The New Republic, but their rates are derisory. How about Esquire, or even one of those in-flight rags—Sky, American Way? Light on the prestige, but they pay great.” Uncapping himself a Choque, Edgar felt his cheeks tingle. In his nervousness, he’d blanked on the fact that Henry had no need to swallow his pride for fifty cents a word.

  Henry smiled grimly at Edgar’s faux pas. “Cheers, mate. I’m chuffed. Don’t think I don’t appreciate the gesture. But it ain’t necessary, right?”

  “Yeah,” Edgar scrambled, “I guess in your, you know, position, you should stick to the heavy hitters.”

  “Sorry, I meant it was dead decent of you to shift the subject right when you walked in. A soldierly effort, but doomed, mate. We’ve tried avoiding Barrington. It don’t work. Becomes just another way of talking about the bloke. Reduces all other subjects to diversion, like. So now I push him right to the top of the agenda. That way there’s some chance we can wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know-what-I-mean at something else. We haven’t yet. But here’s hoping.” Henry clinked his Diamond White whimsically against Edgar’s cerveja.

  Curious about the down-market booze, Edgar said, “I noticed last time you’re a Diamond White man, but I couldn’t find any to bring. You import it yourself?”

  “By the lorry-load. When you’re flush, you sort out that you right fancy stuff that’s dirt cheap. Like bangers and beans—which is yards better with mealy forty-nine-P sausages than the posh sort with walnuts.”

  “Yeah, simple pleasures,” Edgar agreed, concluding after another slug of Choque that any brew that was 8 percent alcohol couldn’t be all bad. “Hard to beat plain buttered toast.”

  “Or,” said Henry as Nicola returned with snacks, “nipping home to your wife dead confident that you’re the apple of her bleeding eye.”

  Nicola’s face turned aside as if she’d been slapped.

  “So, Edgar,” Henry proceeded, ignoring his wife. “Caught the Barrington bug yet? When he first got here, Reinhold Glück thought we was all barking—so much bother over one bloke. By the time he left, I’d to promise on a stack of Bibles to ring if Bear comes up for air. Glück’s in a panic to interview our local Jack-the-lad for Der Spiegel.”

  “Hey, I’d love to talk about something else. No one will let me.” Edgar perched on a stool whose three wooden legs supported a broad, springy leather bicycle seat. A multimillionaire, and Nicola cannibalizes her old Raleigh three-speed for furniture. “Including you.”

  “I’m getting the bastard out of my system.” Henry chugged his cider, which didn’t seem to be his first. “Trouble is, that’s a crap substitute for getting him out of someone else’s.”

  “I’ve the same problem as you, Edgar,” said Nicola coldly. “It’s like parting a dog from his bone. Henry won’t let me bury it.” Nicola raised her head in defiance, folding her legs into an armchair. Her knees were small and chiseled. Though she always seemed self-possessed, tonight she owned herself to excess, cocooning her shawl tightly around both arms.

  Edgar gestured to the fringed shawl, whose vivid pink and yellow roses jumped from a black background. “That scarf’s very striking.”

  Henry chuckled. “Nice try.”

  “Thank you,” said Nicola calmly. “It was a present.”

  “So,” said Edgar, “you can give nice gifts to the rich.”

  “It isn’t from Henry,” she said deadpan. “It’s from Moscow.”

  “All roads lead.” Henry thumped his Doc Martens on the coffee table.

  “Henry insisted I wear it. Since I don’t own a hair shirt.”

  “We’re giving that wrap some air, right?” said Henry. “Letting the spell wear off, like you get rid of a smell.”

  “Forgive us, Edgar,” said Nicola. “I’d thought we might talk about how you found Barba. Maybe explore what drove you to leave the law, which must have been lucrative, for the insecure life of a journalist. I thought that was an intriguing leap. Courageous, even. But I’m afraid that conversation will have to wait. My husband is only interested in discussing our old friend, Barrington Saddler. Henry misses Barrington, though he’ll not tell you that, and if Henry wants to talk about Barrington, that’s just what we’ll do.”

  Nicola clasped her hands like a teacher at story time. “Henry claims that my shawl has a ‘spell’ cast on it. But as I recall, Edgar, you’re the skeptical sort who can’t bear to watch a magic show without finding out what the trick is—where’s the false bottom, how do you palm the hard-cooked egg. Isn’t that what you asked me last week? How did Barrington ‘do it’? We’ve just watched a fabulous vanishing act; supposedly Barrington has ‘disappeared.’ So first and foremost, my husband owes you a credible explanation of how, for all practical purposes, Barrington is still here.”

  A gauntlet. Edgar was reminded of that old Psych 101 example of “positive punishment” in behaviorism. Some biddy in a loony bin has a towel fetish. She swipes them, hoards the suckers. The lady can’t get enough—or thinks she can’t. Until the staff is told to deliver the crackpot towels, in piles. Every day, more towels. The old bat’s cramped little room towers with towels, and still more towels arrive, mounding outside her door, choking her cupboards, stacking in the shower. Finally, bang: the maids clear off all the linen. The biddy never steals a towel again.

  “You want to know how Barrington did it?” said Henry. “I’ve made a study of it, friend.” Having not, apparently, made a study of B. F. Skinner, Henry took up Nicola’s challenge, as the fetish lady would have greedily squirreled away those first few extra towels delivered by the hospital staff.

  “Lesson One.” Henry raised a finger. “Barrington Goes to a Party. Of course, the hostess will be gutted if you don’t show. So you’ll be late, right? All the guests get into a flap ’cause you’re not there yet, until everybody’s assumed that you’ll not come. Birds grab their bags and mumble how this party’s shite, and of course it’s shite! You’re not there, right?

  “Jesus have mercy, you finally show.” Henry raised both hands evangelically. “The door opens—gasp! Gratitude hits you like a blast furnace. The room hops, turns into a real knees-up; girls bundle to the loo to comb their hair. Oh, and remember, Edgar: nice gear. Since this is a casual bash, a dinner jacket could hint that you came from some other posh do. With one word to the wise, soon the lot know you’re also headed somewhere else. So the crowd’s in a lather about how long they’ve got you to themselves. And it’s a dead cert that the wingding you left and the one you’ll leave for are well more fun than the one they’re at, right? Following me so far?

  “
Now, thanks to Advanced Arsehole lessons, you’ve knotted some nifty tangles into the social fabric. Like those tufts that crop up in Nicky’s knitting. Need me to lay it out plain, like? You’re bonking more than one bird at the do. They slag each other off, wallow in the awkwardness of it all—your brand of slapstick.

  “Meanwhile, spread yourself thin. Divide your time between the center ring and the sideshow downstairs, where you’re conducting hugger-mugger journo business to make everybody else’s dinky socializing seem crap in comparison. But whatever you’re up to, keep the punters in the dark. Since you’ve left this number on four, five machines around town, every fifteen minutes you’ll be called to the blower, just when our little soiree’s in full swing. And when you heave off to the horn, you’ll leave a crater behind you the size of a meteor landing.”

  “I get the picture,” said Edgar testily, more than a little put out by this harangue.

  “While you chat up one skirt, googly-eye her best friend,” Henry carried on. “Keep all relationships as fucked up as possible. Never let anyone know where they stand. Don’t let the bastards take you for granted. And no matter how many bims throw themselves at your feet, make a beeline for forbidden fruit. Try getting your mitts on the one, the only plum in the room that you’re not supposed to pick.”

  “Henry’s right on one point,” said Nicola tolerantly. “Barrington trained people not to count on him, to be grateful for what they could get. Barrington might ring; he might not. A kind of abuse, really.”

  “Skip it, Nicky. You know, that was the first sign something had gone funny?” Henry told Edgar. “She started slagging him off—and Nicky’s the sort thinks up excuses for Hitler. It used to be, ooh, isn’t Barrington switched on, and suddenly she starts picking at the bloke, right? Wasn’t he a bit wicked, was he up to something dodgy with the Sobs, why’d he think airline sabotage was a wheeze instead of tragic, where was his heart . . . Interesting red flag, you reckon?”